


rhythm going round

by lyricalecho



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Not A Yondu Hate Fic, also assumes the ride is canon, but. boy howdy the yondu situation is more complicated than the movie wanted to address huh, discussion of peter's childhood, language warning, shortly before and shortly after gotg2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-12 00:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11726139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricalecho/pseuds/lyricalecho
Summary: Local Man Introduces Raccoon To The Sex Pistols; What Happens Next Will Warm Your Heart





	rhythm going round

**Author's Note:**

> hey i got like.............. weirdly dunked on by the way rocket handled peter's music at the beginning of gotg2, and then i watched like a zillion videos of the disneyland ride where ROCKET DID THE SAME THING, AGAIN, so here's a fic abt two absolute dickheads accidentally, maybe, being best friends. never done that before, olivia. 
> 
> the ride is to blame for a lot of this, including the title lyrics ('give up the funk') and one of the songs used (listed at the end). i dont know what to tell you guys. i got like WAY into this.

The first few times, Peter assumes Rocket's making fun of him - and in his defense, it's Rocket, so that's not exactly unreasonable. 

"What, no tunes?" says Rocket, as they're fleeing a bunch of rabid space cultists for the third time this month. (Or what feels like a month, anyways, based on what Peter remembers of Earth time.) "I thought for sure you would have our thrilling escape track ready to go."

"If you're going to be an ass about it then you don't deserve to hear it," says Peter, in the middle of choosing between four thrilling escape tracks and a little miffed that Rocket chose to call him out on it. 

"I do not understand why Quill is allowed to monopolize our background music," says Drax. "I could perform some stirring atonal war chants. They are horrible to listen to."

"We could just focus on staying alive, for once," says Gamora, in a tone that's not really a suggestion. 

"Have it your way." Rocket shrugs. "Just thought Quill was gonna get all sulky if he didn't get the chance to express himself, is all."

"I don't  _sulk_ ," Peter retorts, sulkily. Gamora rolls her eyes so hard he can physically feel it. 

He only really starts to figure it out a couple weeks later, slow on the uptake as always; Rocket is purportedly repairing the ship, although he's almost definitely installing a bunch of extremely unsanctioned boosters, and as Peter walks past he disentangles himself from wires to glower at him. 

"Can't believe you people expect me to work like this," he grumbles, in the kind of tone that would be under his breath if he were someone with a concept of volume control. 

"...What?" says Peter. 

Rocket throws up his hands. "Oh, sure, whenever  _Quill_  does anything it's like, oh, give me forty-five minutes, I need to curate a playlist for this specific occasion, but  _no_ , it's  _fine_ , Rocket can fix the ship in dead silence, he's just a fuzzy repair drone."

"You..." Peter squints. "You're being serious." He sounds comically slow, which is not something he can really afford in front of Rocket of all people, but this is feeling a little like a fever dream. 

"Ugh, I'll just do it myself," says Rocket, storming over to the tape deck across the ship and jumping a little to hit the play button, where the mix starts in on "Cherry Bomb." "Oh,  _good_. This again."

"Just turn it off, then, if you don't like it," says Peter, who's for sure heard this exact complaint from Rocket a good thirty times. 

"Don't tell me what to do," says Rocket, and picks up the blowtorch again. 

Peter spends the next week and a half trying to integrate this into the hard-earned concept of Rocket as Peter understands him - and the thing is, most of the parts of him good at processing information are also the parts insisting that he drop it. This is what they do: you get close, you deflect, you offer each other a sharp acknowledgement that means you're never going to bring it up again, you move on. Talking about your shit is for quitters.

But it feels so rare, for Rocket - rare to learn something this new, rare for Rocket to express sincere enjoyment of anything besides murder, especially something Peter enjoys - that Peter does the other Most Peter thing he could do, and makes an ill-advised, instinctive choice. 

The next time they're resupplying, one of their moments of not running to or from something, ship docked, Groot busy bothering Gamora, he settles next to the tape deck and waves Rocket over. 

"Rocket!" he says loudly, when Rocket predictably ignores him, and Rocket rolls his eyes. 

"What?"

"Just c'mere, douchebag, I wanna show you something." 

He can hear Rocket muttering " - call me a douchebag - " under his breath as he approaches, but he doesn't seem to threaten any actual violence, coming to stand next to Peter and folding his arms. "...Yeah, great music cube, never seen it before, not like I live on this ship or anything. Good talk, Quill."

He turns to go, probably not in earnestness since he already bothered to come all the way over here, but then again maybe he would; Peter responds, " _In_  the music cube, stupid," and sets in the tape he's been fidgeting with for the past twenty minutes. "Just - listen, ok?"

"You're a fucking maniac, you know that," says Rocket, but he stays; or at least, he doesn't go any farther. Peter hits play. 

After two decades he doesn't have the luxury, or the necessary self-control, to be surprised by any single chord - when you're a scared, difficult, isolated kid in space, you don't really get a choice in absorbing the one thing you have into your bones like it's keeping you alive. And he can't resent that, but it means the only way he can experience anything through the first time now is by watching somebody else. So he keeps his eyes on Rocket, through the crash of the first chords, that growling laugh, and watches as he stills, ears raising, tilting his head just incrementally closer. 

He hides it less well than he usually hides genuine interest, or maybe they just spend way too much time around each other now, which is awful. 

"What's a U.K.?" he asks, music-loud but not Rocket-loud, when they hit the chorus. 

"Oh, it's this place back on Earth where everyone is really stuffy all the time," says Peter. "I've never been there." He considers, then adds: "You would hate it."

"And so these guys want to - "

"Fuckin' burn it down, yeah."

Rocket cackles. "Awesome."

He doesn't leave, doesn't even make an excuse; he stays, and listens to the whole song, and doesn't even talk over it. Peter stops it as soon as it ends, can't risk the moment overstaying its welcome, but even then Rocket doesn't seem quite jolted out of it. 

"Why the hell are you keeping all this good stuff to yourself?" he says. "I didn't even realize you had anything besides - "

Besides the tape that he's never let go of that's his one connection to his dead mom, right, yeah, of course. "I had a couple others," he says, lightly. "Few of 'em I had with me when I left Earth, a couple others I managed to get off traders and such, but it takes a while for anything to get out here, especially when people don't really know what these things are, or care." He taps the eject button. "This one I actually got when I was a kid from one of my cousins, but I couldn't let my mom know about it because the band had the word 'sex' in the name."

"What's a cousin?" says Rocket. 

Peter pops the tape out and sets it back into the case. "You know, I can't believe after all this time I still can't tell when you're messing with me or not." Rocket looks triumphant. "Anyways, Yondu always used to threaten to throw them out if I didn't listen to him, and I'm pretty sure I left at least a couple back there when I bolted, so those are definitely gone by now."

It comes out bitterer than he meant it to, though of course Rocket doesn't speak to it; but his gaze stays steady on the cassette in Peter's hand. 

"...You want it?" he says, offering it forward. "There's other songs on here besides that one. I could let you be in charge of music maybe once a month. Twice, even."

Like a spell being broken; Rocket pulls a face. "Yeah, uh, no thanks, I don't really want to be touching something with your weird preteen human cooties just all over it." He turns to leave, as though this signals the end of his attention span, and calls over his shoulder, "Cool song, though!"

Peter shrugs, and sets the tape down on the table by the deck; when he looks again the next day it's gone. Sometimes he swears he can hear Rocket humming across the ship, but he never asks about it. He's come close enough to breaking that sacred pact, for now. And when Rocket nearly botches a whole mission trying to get his jury-rigged sound system working, there's a part of Peter, not preoccupied with fighting a giant tentacle monster, that feels - something like accomplished. Or bigger than that. Connected, or whatever. 

And then - Rocket steals an assload of batteries and botches the mission way worse than any of them could have predicted, and  _fine_ , maybe it sucks because Peter thought they were getting somewhere, and then there's a whole bunch of wacky dad stuff, and then they all nearly get eaten by a planet, and everything, and Yondu - 

\- There's a funeral. They don't need to talk about it. Rocket says something, and Peter says something back, and they put everything back where it belongs. 

Rocket finds him, about a week later, messing with the Zune. He's still feeling his way through it, and the unmooring sensation of sounds he's never heard before, trying to steady himself on them instead of wondering what's being made on Earth now that he'll never get to listen to, or his mom, or Yondu - 

\- But he's got this, at least. "Hey," he says, because Rocket hasn't spoken up yet, uncharacteristically. "Nice timing, actually, I was just thinking that I wanted to show you something - "

Actually, he might have been holding onto it for a while; actually, he might have been methodically going through all of the songs and making note of the ones each of them would like, even if there's no way he'd ever get anyone to listen besides maybe Mantis, but Rocket doesn't need to know any of that. Peter hands over the headphones. 

"Are you for real?" says Rocket, and when Peter doesn't falter Rocket snatches them out of his hands and puts them on. 

It's a little frictionless, watching Rocket listen without Peter being able to hear, without knowing each note as it hits, only going by Rocket's face, focused and weirdly unexasperated. He tries not to stare. 

"It's not as good as the other one," says Rocket definitively after about a minute. 

"It's not," Peter agrees. "But it does have the words 'fire all your guns at once and explode into space,' so I thought it might be worth sharing."

"Yeah, that part ain't bad," Rocket says, amicably for Rocket, handing Peter back the headphones. 

"It's older than the Sex Pistols one, actually," says Peter, wrapping the cord a few times around his hand. "But I never had a tape of this one, so it's. Different."

Rocket nods, then: "...He did keep some of them." He says it like he did seeing the fireworks, the way he still talks about the old Groot sometimes, staring fully away from Peter, slowing just a little. 

"What?" Peter says. 

"Yondu," Rocket says, waving a hand towards him but still not meeting eyes. "You said before that you left some music rectangles behind and he probably threw them out, but he, uh - when I was on the ship he still had some of them. At least one, anyways."

"Oh." There's probably more he should say than that, but like everything new he learns about Yondu it feels weird, like a piece to a puzzle that isn't actually Peter's to put together - weirder because he can't figure out why Rocket even needs him to know. 

"...Look, Quill," says Rocket, letting out one long settling breath, still not looking at him. "We were - talking, a lot, I guess, while we were on that ship. And afterwards. Like, definitely way too much. And it sort of - there was all this very blatant subtext about how we were sort of very similar guys. Which is true. Or as true as it could get, anyways. And along with all the other really spectacular things about me, that Yondu definitely wasn't as good at - I can be sort of a shithead. Which is funny and cool when I do it, but I'm... not a parent."

Peter glances over Rocket's shoulder, to where Groot is playing with the box Rocket built for him ('I just put a bunch of buttons on it that don't do anything so that maybe he'll stop trying to press buttons that do something.') "You sure about that?"

"Wh - " Rocket follows Peter's stare and turns back, burying his face in his hands. "Fuck. Fuck. Goddammit." Peter starts to laugh and Rocket snaps up, pointing menacingly at him. " _Don't_ ," he says, and Peter doesn't really bother to stifle it. "Also that's different," he adds. "Groot's different. He's not the sensitive type." 

Peter realizes, once again, he's having trouble following the throughline. "Are you... calling me sensitive?"

" _Please_ , Quill." Rocket rolls his eyes. "You're the most delicate asshole I've ever met." 

"Uh, I don't - "

"Look, are you gonna let me say my thing or not?" says Rocket, and Peter shrugs a little helplessly. "It's - agh, you're all throwing me off. It's like - ok, I've never forgiven anyone for anything, right? This punk on some crummy moon colony scammed me out of twenty credits once and if I ever see him again I'm gonna shoot him in the head. And I'm sure everyone I've ever grifted feels the same way about me, although most of them are dead already, because they're suckers. So I don't believe in that. And I especially don't believe in letting someone off the hook once they're dead because it doesn't matter then anyways. And you always - " He huffs, like he's growing agitated. " - You always just tossed out what a shitty time you had as a kid and how freaked out and miserable you were all the time so I don't get why - agh, whatever.  _Whatever_. Look, it's - just because someone's dead and also your fake dad doesn't mean you have to be all like, 'oh, no, it's okay now.' Maybe they're still just a shithead. They don't gotta deal with it anymore either way."

Peter stares. "...Rocket, that's - " he starts, and then isn't sure how to continue. Presumptuous; weirdly astute; an oversimplication; crossing a boundary Peter had assumed was about a thousand feet high and bulletproof; the first time since all of this started that anyone including Peter spoke to whoever Peter used to be. "I - you know, saying that, I think maybe it's about - "

Rocket waves his hands rapidly. "Nope, nope, nope," he says. "I said all my shit, I don't really care how you're feeling, we're not doing a whole thing here, okay."

In fairness to both of them; Peter took a few decades to get over his mother, so he's certainly not going to be dealing with any of this for a while yet. "...Can I just say that it's complicated?"

"Everything's complicated with you people," says Rocket. "Just promise that when I die you won't be at my funeral talking about how I was pretty nice all along."

Peter laughs. "You're gonna outlive all of us, Rocket," he says. "Probably gonna kill me, in the end. But yeah, my ghost will show up to make sure everyone knows what a dick you are."

"Fair deal," says Rocket. He reaches out to take the Zune from Peter's hand and hesitates just long enough for Peter to hand it to him - no one outside of them would notice. Peter does. Rocket starts scrolling through the songs, and then says, "What's that story Gamora's always talking about you telling her? With the town of human idiots with sticks in their asses, and one guy has to tell them all what dancing is?"

"Okay, that's not - it's a really good movie, actually, and she doesn't explain it right at all, but Kevin Bacon - "

"That's a pretty good story," Rocket interrupts, his attention still squarely on the tiny screen. "I mean, it would probably be better if it wasn't about a bunch of boring pink meatbags. But still. Not bad."

"...Yeah," Peter agrees, leaning back a little. "Yeah, it's not bad."

There's people who dance, and there's people who don't, and there's people who bust you out of a weird space museum through an elevator shaft while blasting a song you showed them. Or: maybe only one person. Either way - Peter feels a little glad to know him, even if they don't have to say it. It's not a bad kind of people to have. 

**Author's Note:**

> [the first song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbmWs6Jf5dc); [the second song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMbATaj7Il8)


End file.
